In Sebastián Borensztein’s film Un cuento chino (2011), Jun, a Chinese migrant stranded in Buenos Aires, played by Taiwanese-Argentine actor Ignacio Huang, is taken in by lonesome hardware store owner, played by Argentine star Ricardo Darín. Yet this gesture of refuge comes with strict terms: Jun must work, and he must leave within eight days. While hospitality tends to be imagined as an act of care, it is fundamentally structured by power: the host retains sovereign authority to dictate who enters, under what conditions, and for how long. Derrida famously argues that while unconditional hospitality represents an ethical ideal of absolute openness to the stranger, hospitality as it is practiced is necessarily conditional, regulated by the laws, institutions, and sovereign authority of the host. In this sense, hospitality is often temporary and inextricable from exclusion, with the capacity to welcome inseparable from the power to regulate integration and settlement. 

Drawing on the tension between hospitality and hostility, this seminar moves beyond the premise of visibility and diverse representation to examine how film, television, and visual arts capture the conditional experiences of Asian migrants and their descendants in Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula. The visibility attained by artists such as Spanish Chinese graphic novelist Quan Zhou Wu and Korean Argentine actor Chang Sun Kim does not signify complete social integration or the end of persistent racialization of Asians in the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America. The recent return to power of a member of the Fujimori family in Peru, to evoke a different kind of higher profile visibility, should not be taken as evidence that longstanding forms of racial exclusion toward Asian diasporic subjects have been overcome. This seminar explores how highly visible figures instead underscore the paradox of individual success and precarious belonging experienced by Asian migrants and descendants more broadly.

• In what ways have the visual arts (film, television and/or other visual media) imagined Asian subjects in Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula?
• Under what circumstances are Asians welcomed, tolerated, or rejected in these two regions?
• How do contemporary Latin American and Iberian visual cultural productions reveal the paradox of being simultaneously applauded and marginalized, welcomed yet rendered perpetually foreign?

By examining a range of contemporary cultural representations from across Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula, the seminar seeks to interrogate the complex negotiations of belonging, exclusion, and difference that shape the experiences of Asian migrants and descendants in the world.